HELP WANTED: A New CD 15 Council Rep
Do you know who’s running to replace Joe Buscaino?
One would have thought that the entire power structure of San Pedro insiders had shown up on Saturday April 9 to inaugurate Tim McOsker’s campaign office on Gaffey and Seventh streets. This included Supervisor Janice Hahn, former councilman Rudy
Svorinich Jr., two San Pedro Chamber of Commerce presidents and one from the Wilmington
Chamber of Commerce and a list of Democratic electeds, LA Fire Department (some with the last name McOsker) and the current president of the LA City Council Nury Martinez. All there to sing the praises for McOsker, the former chief of staff of Mayor James Hahn.
Sergio Carrillo, vice-chair of the LA Democratic Party — well known for his campaign consulting, emceed the affair with great exuberance introducing the long list of notables. The McOsker family filled up nearly a quarter of the small corner office; the Irish are the second largest European nationality in San Pedro. The primary
election is still six weeks off, but the kickoff event sounded more like a victory party before the election was even held. It did get me wondering.
The traditional logic of winning the 15th District is that the weight of the voters are here in the San Pedro area, but not the majority of the population.
If you win here and do reasonably well in Watts you can lose the rest of the district and still win. This has been true since the time of Joan Milke-Flores, if not before, but is this still true?
Danielle Sandoval, the former president of Harbor City Neighborhood Council, has been working for months to rally support from both Wilmington and Harbor City. Two areas of the district that suffer from perceived benign neglect from City Hall. As the only Latina on the ballot, she may have some advantage demographically in a district where more than 51% of the population speaks Spanish. Her challenge is if she gets them to turn out to vote.
Bryant Odega, a UCLA graduate, who comes from the Harbor Gateway Neighborhood Council and has been endorsed by the Sunrise Movement, has been focused on bringing out the younger environmental activists. He is bright, intelligent and well-spoken. Yet of all the candidates, he seems to have the highest hill to climb with little name recognition and is the only African-American candidate in a district where Black people only make up 13.7% of the population.
The wild card in this race is Anthony Santich, a businessman from San Pedro with deep family ties in the Croatian and Italian community and one of the several former San Pedro Chamber presidents not at McOsker’s opening. Santich has been a fixture in the Los Angeles Harbor Area, especially in Wilmington for years. He almost ran against Joe Buscaino in the last election. Back then, as he was preparing to run, he claims that McOsker lobbied his then employer to pull the plug on him. So this race has some of the underpinnings of being a grudge match, yet you’d hardly know it by Anthony’s ever-present smile.
So what’s different with this election? It’s the first municipal election that coincides with an even year national election and there are now universal mail-in ballots. Will this tip the scales?
The mail-out of ballots will start arriving soon for the June 7 primary. If any of these candidates gets over 50% in the primary, there will be no runoff election in November. This is what the McOsker campaign is shooting for and it might seem more like a coronation if this happens. However, with Santich potentially breaking up the San Pedro voting block and Sandoval and Odega attracting other demographics it is plausible that there will actually be a race for the 15th Council District seat vacated by Joe Buscaino, who is amidst his quixotic run for LA mayor.
Note: Random Lengths News , in cooperation with Harbor Gateway North Neighborhood Council and the Athens on the Hill Community Association, is hosting a virtual candidate debate/forum on May 7 (see details on p. 10).
In the meantime, here is what the candidates have to say for themselves:
Bryant Odega
Bryant Odega is a teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District, renter, son of Nigerian immigrants, a community organizer for climate justice, and a former member of the Harbor Gateway Neighborhood Council. Aligned with Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter, Bryant affiliates himself with the politically progressive wing of American politics.
His campaign runs on a platform of grassroots activism, housing, economic and environmental justice. In his words, his campaign is “rooted in his love of humanity and sense of purpose.”
The goals of his city council bid include addressing the 25% poverty rate in the district, wanting to help mitigate the environmental and health impact of the massive port and urban oil field in the Harbor Area. Odega prides himself on being a candidate that refuses both corporate and big money donations, emphasizing an urge to get these sorts of interests out of politics.
“My theory of change in politics is building people power and mobilizing everyday people into having an impact on the political process,” Odega said in an interview. “In my district 60% of people are renters and they pay on average a third of their income on rent. I want to fight for all people, regardless of where they come from.”
Odega says that it was these issues that convinced him to run
and that his district “has been struggling for far too long. Because our district has been one of the most hard-hit districts in the city when it comes to these issues. We must have the boldest fighter for justice, who is accountable — not to big money interests — but to the people.”
Danielle Sandoval
Sandoval has served in multiple neighborhood councils throughout Council District 15. She is also a businesswoman who operates a paralegal service centered on intellectual property, family law and civil litigation.
Sandoval prides herself as a coalition builder and for the grassroots nature of her campaign, specifically, the rate at which she goes out to meet directly with constituents and how she self-educates on what needs to be done and where money is allocated.
On the built environment, Sandoval is very outspoken. She is against increasing the density in District 15, citing that they would increase crowding, that they are often awarded via officials giving the proposals to friends, and that the majority rental market they create is temporary and does not serve to create any generational wealth.
To address houselessness and help create homeownership, instead of density, Sandoval keeps on her an array of other tools. She pushes against the Airbnb market that consumes housing stock and is a proponent of a vacancy tax, both for business and residential buildings. Supporting this, she says, is how buildings are often simply abandoned by their owners and that the district’s residents are “being priced out of our community.”
Specifically for the unhoused, her program lines up with much of what is being done at first. She is in favor of the container housing, tiny home villages and micro-housing projects that are springing up throughout LA County. In addition, she seeks expansions and reopenings of mental health facilities and assistance for the unhoused in gaining skills and expungement of tickets.
She says she will address governmental structures both like a business and like a family. On city budgets she said, “The city is a business, I know the business. I started with looking at city budgets and realized it was upside down,” stating further that the current lack of transparency has resulted in major misallocation of departmental resources.
Parks and 15th District’s youth population are a crucial point of her platform. “I am a mom and I grew up in a high-risk area,” Sandoval said. “We need to create buffer zones around our schools and create green spaces.”
Sandoval talks about bringing affordability to youth recreation programs and fulfilling the promise of skate parks, after-school programs and youth sports. She says that these build relationships and create a sense of community, which seems to be the focal point of her entire candidacy.
Anthony D. Santich
A lifelong San Pedran, Anthony Santich has deep Croatian and Italian roots in the Los Angeles Harbor Area. His grandfather, Andy Trutanich, managed the Starkist Foods cannery which employed 4,000 residents. Santich says role models like his grandfather and parents shaped his sense of civic duty and appreciation for community involvement, engagement and advocacy.
A graduate of San Pedro High School and an All-Marine League athlete, he attended Idaho State University on an athletic scholarship. Upon graduation, he took up the professions of sales and marketing in the Los Angeles area. He later joined the business development and marketing group at the Port of Los Angeles. He held several roles and responsibilities at the port, including liaison to the Port Community Advisory Committee where he worked with Harbor Area stakeholders, and port marketing manager — in regards to container and liquid bulk terminals.
Santich volunteers for the Harbor Area Pilots Youth Organization, a football program for at-risk youth in Wilmington. He raised $50,000 for new helmets, uniforms and scholarships for financially disadvantaged student athletes who wanted to be on the team.
For more than ten years, Mr. Santich has been a volunteer with the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force, which includes local, state and federal law enforcement agencies dedicated to investigating, prosecuting and developing effective responses to internet crimes against children. As a volunteer, Mr. Santich raised funds for the ICAC.
Describing the politics and institutions that animate the Los Angeles City Hall and the Port of Los Angeles as an elitist system that doesn’t work for the people, Santich has been a witness to unethical backroom deals, dubious lobbyist relationships, and systemic resistance to an open and fair process. He says these practices have led to wasteful spending of public funds, a lack of community benefits, and insider corruption. Santich says his unique qualifications have given him an understanding of how to prevent the misuse of funds and fund employment opportunities, affordable housing, public safety and port pollution mitigation efforts.
Tim McOsker
Tim McOsker is the former chief of staff to ex-mayor James Hahn and a police union lobbyist. Lately he has served as executive officer of AltaSea, an as-of-yet unbuilt institute for oceanic research, and sits on the board of a number of local non-governmental organizations.
McOsker has deep pockets in the Los AngeMcOsker les political scene and is close to former CD 15 Councilwoman and current LA County Supervisor, Janice Hahn. His entering of the race to succeed Joe Buscaino is a no-brainer. As of now, he has out-raised the most of any candidates leaning heavily on corporate and large union donations and paying out half of all his campaign expenditures and twice that of the total expenditures of the nearest campaign, roughly $50,000 to consulting groups Avila LLC and J&Z Strategies, ensuring that McOsker has a lot of skin in the game.
As a candidate, McOsker has five tent pole issues surrounding his campaign, houselessness, jobs, crime, climate change and transparency.
Council District 15 candidate Anthony Santich. Photo courtesy of the Santich campaign’s Facebook page
on unhoused Angelenos says he is an advocate of supportive housing and embraces such solutions as shipping containers to housing good company of the homophobia of the 80s and racism of the ‘60s. There is a legislative agenda right now to remove transgender people from public spaces by any means required, and I for one will not be quiet about it.
Editorial Intern conversions, tiny homes, and renovation of existing facilities, without discerning between public or private operations.
On economic opportunities in CD 15, he proposes an emphasis firstly on local businesses and secondly on the perpetuation of well-paying union jobs.
Interestingly, McOsker’s website discusses the uptick in crime and calls for additional police funding. While true in the most micro of sense, violent crime is up roughly 0.4% statewide, he fails to mention that even with a marginal uptick we sit at historic lows since the 1970s, according to the yearly report put out by the California Attorney General’s office. This claim of his is then extrapolated to raise concerns of a lack of enforcement regarding gun laws.
In regards to climate and the dangers of climate change, he talks about ensuring a balance of greening our local industries without sacrificing the retention of workers.
His statements on transparency trend towards the confusing. He champions efficiency and transparency yet nowhere does he seem to outline how he seeks to achieve this.
Still, McOsker proves a candidate with a slew of resources and a long history of public service.